


Breathless

by damnslippyplanet



Series: Breaking Strength [2]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Cliffhanger? Sort of?, Frustrated Cannibal and Empath Noises, Hannibal is Hannibal, Lots of Murdering, M/M, Not Much Husbanding, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, Someone Please Teach The Boys To Use Their Words, Their Dysfunction Has A Body Count, Who is Also Confused And Poor Life Choice-Making Will, alternating pov, dark!Will, it's a mess, tags subject to update
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-08
Updated: 2016-01-08
Packaged: 2018-05-05 14:01:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 10,918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5377865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/damnslippyplanet/pseuds/damnslippyplanet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The boys are still working out some of their interpersonal issues, but in the meanwhile, there's fishing to be done. So to speak.</p><p>This follows on from <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/5274599/chapters/12172163">Busywork</a> and will probably make more sense if you've read that first, but it's not absolutely required if you just start from the knowledge that we're in a post-finale world where the Murder Husbands are doing a lot of murdering and very little husband-ing, and neither of them are entirely happy with that situation, for different reasons.</p><p>Part 2 of what will be a 3-part series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_"All the romance of trout fishing exists in the mind of the angler and is in no way shared by the fish."_  
_\- Harold F. Blaisdell, The Philosophical Fisherman_

Hannibal enters the bar first. He manages to avoid making a face at the sticky, noisy miasma of of the place and finds just the right place to observe. He locates a booth set somewhat back from the bar, dark enough that he can hope not to be pestered too much, close enough that he’ll have a view.

The draft list isn’t too terrible. He manages to find something drinkable, places his order with a waitress wearing appalling perfume, and sits back to wait and watch the one-man show that’s scheduled to play out for him. Only for him.

He doesn’t have to wait too long. Will enters only a few minutes later, all messy soft curls and glasses and one of the tailored shirts Hannibal bought him. He may not wear them at home, preferring his own less form-fitting selections. But he knows the importance of the proper lure for the proper prey, and he wears Hannibal’s wardrobe selections without a fuss when they go fishing.

He makes his way over to the bar somewhat awkwardly, playing up a bit of unease on the crutches, and the crowd parts in front of him in a wave to let him take a seat. Even in a shitty dive bar, there’s apparently enough basic human decency floating around to clear a path for a guy who appears to be barely able to handle standing up with his leg cast and crutches.

Will settles in, props the crutches against the bar, and orders a drink. Once it arrives he spins the stool gently around so he can look out around the bar, see what there is to see. He scans slowly over the crowd. He searches and he finds and the nod he gives Hannibal when their eyes meet is miniscule. You wouldn’t notice it if you weren’t watching for it, and Will just keeps sweeping his eyes in their pattern across the room. But when he’s done surveying the crowd, he ends up positioned so that Hannibal can see him, lovely and vulnerable and to all appearances alone.

He’s getting so good at this, after the first few awkward failures. He’s found the right set of mannerisms to slip into that aren’t his own, that provide the distance he needs to play the role he needs to play. It’s bright and false and brittle and somehow none of their prey ever seem to notice; they accept the colorful surface plumage of Will and miss entirely the deep and dangerous things beneath. The broken leg adds a nice extra touch to the proceedings; a helplessness, a wounded-bird signalling.

Sometimes Hannibal thinks he would rather watch this than any opera or ballet he’s ever attended. It takes his breath away to know that he’s the sole audience for each singular, never-to-be-repeated performance. Or at least, the sole audience member who survives the experience.

Hannibal waits, and he watches, as Will goes fishing for them both. 

He nurses the single beer and mostly sips at the glass of water he also requested; it wouldn’t do to have his reflexes slowed tonight. He’s surprised to note that Will appears to be actually drinking, multiple drinks, more than he’s ever seen him take on the nights that they play this game. Maybe he’s getting into his role a little more than usual. Maybe he’s allowing himself an indulgence since he knows Hannibal’s going to be doing the majority of the work this evening once the lure is set. 

Maybe, Hannibal lets himself imagine, Will finally trusts that Hannibal won’t let any harm come to him. He lets that thought warm him as he waits.

Hannibal watches people approach Will, a pretty thing all alone at a busy bar. Most, Will chats with briefly and then dismisses, waiting for better things. At some point he undoes a collar button, then two, as his face grows flushed with the drinks or the warmth or the attention or the secret game they’re playing. Hannibal fixes the image in his mind, to be saved away for a future drawing.

Hannibal mostly manages to stay unobtrusive although a few people attempt to strike up conversations. It’s not the sort of bar where one generally goes alone if one also intends to end the evening that way. One particularly persistent admirer is hard to shake. She tries to take a seat at Hannibal’s booth. She rests a hand on Hannibal’s arm.

And when Hannibal looks up he sees Will watching. There and gone so fast he may have imagined it but is sure he did not, he sees those blue eyes spark with the first genuine emotion they’ve held all night. A quick dark snap of something fierce, something with teeth and claws. 

Will may not want to touch Hannibal beyond their casual everyday intimacy and the occasional bloody night of just slightly more and yet nothing like enough. But apparently he doesn’t want anyone else to, either. _That’s interesting_. 

Hannibal hides a half-smile in his drink and dismisses the woman kindly but firmly and watches Will relax fractionally. He wonders if Will is even aware of what he’s just given away. He wonders if he misread that look. He’s almost certain he didn’t. Almost, but not entirely, and the gap between the two contains a world of possibilities. He tucks the thought away for later consideration.

Eventually, a man comes into Will’s orbit who appears to be of potential interest. This one, Will keeps a bit longer than the others, talking, allowing another round of drinks to be bought for him. He tips his head to the side to let this newcomer say something quiet into his ear, something meant for him alone. Will smiles slow and easy and false, and replies something Hannibal would give anything to hear. He silently curses the thumping music and briefly considers the DJ as a target if this one slips from Will’s hook.

Hannibal must be watching the proceedings a little too intently because he’s drawn the attention of Will’s current admirer. There’s another comment. A shared glance his way. Another smile and laugh, and Will nods for his new friend but the barely-raised eyebrow and the gleam in his eye, that’s all Hannibal’s.

Bait taken. Hook set. Will is getting so good at this and Hannibal is so _proud_ he could burst, to have played a part in cracking Will open to reveal what Hannibal always knew he would be, underneath. Not for the first time, he considers that if Jack Crawford catches up with them tomorrow and Hannibal never sees daylight again, it was worth it for these past months.

He tips his glass ever so slightly in Will’s general direction and takes one more swallow, before reaching for his wallet. He leaves cash, a large enough tip to compensate for the time he’s spent occupying space and nursing a single drink, but not so large that he’ll be memorable if someone comes asking questions about who was in this bar the night that a man disappeared.

He reaches for his coat and passes Will at the bar and resolutely does not make eye contact. He steps out into the night and breathes the fresh air deep into his lungs. It’s heavy with smoke and unfortunate cooking smells and car exhaust but it’s still better than the inside of that bar. He enjoys it for a moment, and then heads for the car.

He slides behind the steering wheel of their car and waits patiently for his lure, and their quarry, to emerge and lead him into the night.


	2. Chapter 2

Will makes a show of being clumsy getting to the car, awkward on the crutches, maybe a little bit drunker than he should be. It’s not entirely a show; Will probably shouldn’t have had that last drink or even the one before that. But he’s not so far gone as all that. He’s just trying to be good bait. And, possibly, to amuse Hannibal, although he’s not looking back at their car to gauge the response. He doesn’t need to; he knows that after so many years of Will being semi-broken in actuality, Hannibal finds it entertaining to see him play-acting the part now when he believes Will to be finally and entirely whole. 

In quieter moments, Will is not unaware of the irony. All of the years he’d tried to have something like a normal social life or love life, all the nights of going home alone, or maybe once in a long while successfully taking someone home only to regret it terribly the next day. All of those years he couldn’t have been worse bait if he’d been trying. But now it’s easy, now when he fishes for an entirely different result. 

It’s some combination of factors. He left so much of his old self in the sea when he rose from it a new thing, with Hannibal at his side. And he’s buoyed by the knowledge of Hannibal watching him, believing he will succeed (and there to step in should something go wrong). And, maybe more than anything else, it’s the simple knowledge that what Will wants from his catches isn’t what they think it is. There’s no panic about doing everything wrong, because he’s playing by an entirely different rulebook from an entirely different game.

It’s fun, sometimes, to watch for the exact moment when they figure out what the real game is. But that won’t be for a while yet.

Will makes Jim (“James But You Can Call Me Jim, You Pretty Thing”) open the car door for him (“It’s a pain in the ass with these damn things”) and he folds himself into the passenger seat with a sigh before handing over the crutches and letting Jim toss them into the back seat. He allows himself one quick flick of a glance in the side mirror as they pull away, just enough to see Hannibal leaving his own parking space and falling unobtrusively into the middle distance behind them. Then he dismisses it; Hannibal will follow, and if by some small chance he loses track of them, Will can call him in the guise of “checking on the dogsitter” or some such nonsense, and tell him where they ended up.

His heart is racing now, not alarmingly so, just a smooth steady escalation that makes him giddy, makes him a little reckless, makes him believe in his bones that this will all work out perfectly because how could it not, when it feels this good? Someday they’re going to get caught. But he’s pretty sure it’s not going to be today.

He turns his attention to James-or-Jim and makes small talk as they drive. The weather, sports, “oh-I-don’t-usually-do-this-sort-of-thing,” the usual. Will holds up his end of the inane conversation, well-lubricated enough with alcohol that it’s easy to do with half his mind, and meanwhile he thinks about how James-or-Jim is going to die. Or he tries to.

The images keep swimming and slipping. He’s trying to picture a knife stroke and all he can come up with is the hands that will hold the knife, blood flecks spattering backward onto large practiced surgeon’s fingers. He tries to picture Hannibal choking the life from James-or-Jim but instead of seeing fluttering eyelids, hitching breath, scrabbling fingers, all he sees is the strong arm bent around a gasping throat. He thinks _blood, viscera, screams_ but it keeps getting overwhelmed by _eyes, hands, Hannibal_ as if James-or-Jim is just an afterthought. An excuse. A proxy.

He’s hotter and harder than he should be and it’s so fucking wrong. He wants so badly to prove to himself that this can just be killing and it doesn’t _have_ to be this blurry murder-sex-thing that his body keeps trying to convince him of, that he almost tells James-or-Jim to just pull off the road right there. Find somewhere dark and private and strangle the man with his own bare hands. Just to prove he can, on his own, and that it would satisfy him just fine. That he doesn’t need Hannibal for this. Just wants him for it. Just _wants_.

He might do it if he thought he could manage it with the bum leg. Instead he just distracts himself with the running stream of inanity until they get to the house. It’s as set apart from the neighbors as he’d hoped, looks like there might be some space around back to pull the car around for extra privacy. Ought to do just fine.

James-or-Jim leaves him to fish his crutches out of the backseat himself and Will allows himself a tiny eye-roll. Rude. Not what the guy’s going to die for, but still. Rude. 

James-or-Jim does at least wait by the car to make sure Will’s up and steady enough, and holds the front door open for Will to enter the house. Once they’re inside, Will lets James-or-Jim lead the way toward the kitchen to fix them another drink. He hangs back. He makes sure the front door is unlocked for Hannibal.

Then he follows his host into the kitchen and accepts a glass of terrible whiskey. He shouldn’t drink any more anyway, but he’s definitely not drinking this. He makes a vague show of wetting his lips and thanks Jim for the drink, and all the while he’s listening, straining for the sound of the front door or a footstep.

Hannibal moves like a ghost, a demon or an angel - something unearthly. Even knowing he’s coming, Will doesn’t hear him arrive. He’s just there, standing in the doorway visible past James-or-Jim’s shoulder, and Will bites back both a smile and a leap of anticipation somewhere in his heart or his stomach. 

Sometimes Will drugs them. Medical license or no, Hannibal seems to have a ready supply of useful medications. Sometimes, but not tonight.

Will takes a deep breath and settles in to enjoy his last moments of being bait. The last space of seconds before everyone involved understands the rules of the real game. 

He puts the drink aside and leans in a little, inviting James-or-Jim to remember why they’re ostensibly there in his house together. He runs his hand up James-or-Jim’s arm, across the expanse of his chest, and just as he’s about to get to unbuttoning, just as he’s leaning close enough for a kiss if that were what he had in mind, there’s a flash of movement between them. The garrotte in Hannibal’s hand pulls tight, and Will meant to watch James-or-Jim, he really did. He meant to see that moment when his fish would feel the hook slipped in, the dawning realization, the panic. 

Instead, he finds he’s locked eyes with Hannibal and he can’t look away. He can hear James-or-Jim’s sputtering, and he’s vaguely aware of hands clawing at the tight rope, but they hardly seem worth his attention.

He grabs and pins James-or-Jim’s hands scrabbling at his throat. He holds them as well as he can one-handed, the other hand needed to hold onto the kitchen counter to keep himself upright, between the drinks and the broken leg and the fact that he’s gone weak in the knees.

The noises start to trail off. Will still doesn’t look. He’s trying to understand his own reflection in Hannibal’s eyes. He’s wondering if Hannibal sees his own reflection in Will’s gaze. He wonders if he looked hard enough, if they would form a hall of mirrors, endlessly reflecting each other into a darkness so deep he’d never find his way out. He might never want to find his way out. 

He doesn’t break eye contact until James-or-Jim slumps unconscious between them, until his sputtering pleading sounds stop, leaving only Will’s near-panting breath and Hannibal’s slight grunt as he takes the weight of the falling man in his arms.

And then, finally, Will blinks and looks away and says, “That took you long enough. I was starting to think I might actually have to sleep with him just to kill time until you got here.”

Hannibal makes a noise that’s probably laughter, although it’s hard to tell because he’s also busy lugging James-or-Jim over to a chair. He tosses back over his shoulder, “I’m glad I arrived in time to save you from a dishonorable fate, then. Would you please lock the front door? And if you can manage it, bring me the bag I left out there?”

It’s an oddly domestic request. Will’s half-tempted to say _Yes, dear_ as if he’d been asked to fetch a pipe and slippers, or a cold drink from the refrigerator. He resists the impulse and makes his way out to the entryway to re-lock the front door. He tries to manage the bag but it’s too much to handle with the crutches. He settles for fishing out the length of rope he’s pretty sure Hannibal’s going to ask for next, and returns to hand it over.

“You read my mind.” Hannibal sounds pleased when he takes the rope. He begins to loop it carefully, tying James-or-Jim to the chair to ensure he’ll stay put if he wakes up. Will’s fingers itch to take over as he watches; Hannibal may have been doing the whole indiscriminate-killing thing for a lot longer, but Will knows ropes and knots, and Hannibal’s are serviceable but Will could do better if he were at full capacity. At some point, perhaps he’ll offer some lessons. Right now he rather likes having one or two things he’s better at. 

Hannibal’s work is good enough that pretty soon he can go back out to the hallway and get his bag. Will keeps watch. He takes one of the other chairs nearby, shifts his leg to a reasonably comfortable position, and observes James-or-Jim for signs that he’s returning to consciousness. His chest is still moving, faintly but steadily. Will’s fairly sure he’s not faking it. He’s out. If Hannibal’s in a merciful mood, they’ll end him like this and he won’t have to wake up at all.

Hannibal doesn’t seem like he’s decided yet just what he wants to do. He’s spread out some plastic to take the worst of the mess, and he’s taken a couple of knives from his bag but he’s holding back, considering. Will’s hand twitches with the desire to reach for one of the knives but the last thing he needs is to be slipping around in blood on crutches. He’s strictly in a bait-and-observe capacity tonight. Which, it occurs to Will, might be why Hannibal seems tentative. This is supposed to be something they do together, now. He considers that for a moment and then knows what to do.

He swallows once, hard, and then says, “His throat, please, Hannibal.”

Dark eyes meet his, weighing the request. And then Hannibal nods once, and starts to step behind the chair. Will stops him with a small noise of negation. “From the front, if you would.”

He’s asking, but it sounds like a command. It feels like a command. And Hannibal obeys without hesitation and that’s… _oh_. That sends a shiver right through Will that he can’t bear to think about right now.

Hannibal pauses with the tip of the knife at James-or-Jim’s throat, where it’s already red and wounded from the garrotte, and looks over at Will. “This will be messy. Harder to clean up.” It’s not a complaint, just an observation. Just making sure Will knows what he’s asking.

He knows. He’s asking to see Hannibal painted in blood. For him. At his request, his instruction. He doesn’t trust his voice to do anything more than say, “Please.” 

Hannibal’s eyes drift shut, briefly, savoring the moment. And then in a flash of steel and crimson, he begins. For Will. Because Will wants it.


	3. Chapter 3

It’s closer to dawn than midnight by the time the cleanup is done. It’s slower with only one person. Will’s done his best, handing Hannibal things and pointing out blood spatter he’s missed, but there’s only so much he can do. 

Finally Hannibal looks around the kitchen, suppressing a yawn, and decides it’s the best they can do. They’ll dispose of the body on the way home. It’s a pity they can’t display it properly but it’s too close in time to their last kill, too likely to get attention that could result in them leaving town one step ahead of Jack Crawford.

He looks out the window at the lightening sky again and then over to Will, ensconced comfortably in one of the kitchen chairs. He asks, “Shall we get out of here?”

He’s not expecting the response he gets - a burst of laughter tinged with exhaustion. Will smiling wide and fond at him. “Hannibal. You’re forgetting something.”

Hannibal glances around the kitchen again but everything seems in order. “Do tell.”

“Come over here.” Hannibal responds viscerally to that tone, half bossy teasing, half genuine command, and he’s moving before he quite intends to, over to Will to find out what he’s forgotten.

Will looks up at him from his chair and a moment stretches out between them, quiet, intense with the memory of what they just shared. The man, whose name Hannibal never even bothered to catch, whose blood they spilled together. 

Oh. _Blood_. He realizes what he’s missing just a moment too late, just as Will reaches up and places an almost-gentle hand on Hannibal’s cheek. He leans into it automatically, without thought, eyes half-shutting with the pleasure of touch. And Will could draw his hand back, surely will - but he doesn’t, not for several seconds. Stays there, touch warm, eyes wide, a current running between them with the knowledge that they’ve just taken a life together. It’s a shock that hasn’t lost its novelty or its power yet.

Hannibal briefly forgets to breathe. He wouldn’t even notice except that in the absence of his own breath, he can hear Will’s coming faster. He imagines he can feel Will’s pulse in the palm cupping his jaw lightly.

Eventually the moment breaks and Will pulls his hand away to show Hannibal his palm. It’s painted red now, sticky with the splashed and semi-dried blood that Hannibal had somehow completely forgotten to scrub off his own skin. It’s shocking on Will’s otherwise perfectly clean, pale skin. He says gently, with amusement instead of the horror that anyone else in the world would be displaying right now, “You can’t go home like this. How on earth did you keep from getting caught for so long?”

Hannibal feels his lips curve into a warm, genuine smile as he considers his answer. “I had fewer distractions, at the time. And less improvisation. But also less help. It probably balances out.”

Will mirrors his smile automatically and then glances down at his stained hand for a moment. He seems a little entranced, a little meditative. And then he delicately sticks out just the tip of a pink tongue and licks at the tip of his reddened finger, and Hannibal’s heart stops. Just...stops, in its tracks, and he thinks he might fall down dead in the kitchen and he thinks he might not care.

He watches, on the verge of possible death, as Will tilts his head and considers the taste on his tongue before offering an opinion. “Salty. Is that you, or me, or him?”

Hannibal’s heart thuds painfully back to life and he manages to form words: “Hard to say. Perhaps there’s no meaningful difference at this particular moment.”

“Perhaps.” Will’s face is unreadable as he reaches for his crutches with his clean hand. “Let’s get cleaned up and get out of here.”

Will’s got the smaller cleanup job, so Hannibal hangs back while Will makes his way over to the sink, balances, and rinses off his red hand. They watch the blood swirl down the drain together and then Will leaves the water running, wets a cloth, and beckons Hannibal over, leaning carefully against the counter so his hands are free and he’s reasonably stable on his good leg.

Hannibal lets Will tend to him, running the cloth over the planes of his face and wringing it out in the sink over and over, while the water runs red, and then pink, and then clear. He closes his eyes and lets Will hold his face still, a thumb pressing hard enough to hurt into the stubble on his cheeks, and does not complain. He moves as the pressure of Will’s touch tells him wordlessly to move, so his face and his throat can be cleaned of the blood Will wanted there, and now wants gone. 

He tries to remember what it was like to do this alone for so long, and can’t. He could slip into his memory palace and recall the clinical details of it, certainly, but he can no longer remember why it was worth doing. What any of it was for, before he could see it reflected and accepted and transformed in Will Graham’s eyes. Before it was a gift of unspoken love.

Finally he hears the water turn off, and opens his eyes to see Will’s face close to his, studying him seriously. Will considers him and then nods. “That’s about the best we can do here. Ought to be good enough. Let’s go home.”

Hannibal strips off his outer shirt, leaving a mostly-clean t-shirt underneath. He bundles the bloody cloth into his destroyed buttondown, and they leave together. Out to the car with the body in the trunk. They dispose of the bagged body parts on the way and get home just before the sun comes up.

The stagger into the house bone-weary, satisfied with their night’s work, a little giddy with exhaustion and endorphins, and Hannibal locks the front door behind them. Will stretches and yawns and grins back at Hannibal: “How did you do this and still have a practice and throw all those parties and go to all those awful galas? I could sleep for a week.”

“Surviving medical school and residency is excellent training for functioning on very little sleep.”

“Even so.”

It’s probably the weariness that loosens Hannibal’s tongue a little more than might be wise, and he adds, “Also, I was trying very hard to get your attention. It was worth losing some sleep over.”

He can’t quite read the expression that elicits from Will, but the verbal response is only, “I can’t imagine this was exactly what you had in mind.”

_This is better than anything I had in mind_. He does manage to keep a lid on that; residency is also good practice for not letting exhaustion make you speak too freely. “I don’t have any complaints, Will. At least, none that a hot bath and a change of clothes won’t cure.”

“None?” It’s almost...coy. Almost like Will’s fishing again, but he’s fishing for a response and Hannibal’s not sure what his response is supposed to be. He could say several things. He can’t imagine any of them ending well. 

He opts for a change of subject. “Would you like the first chance at the hot water?”

Will drops his gaze and heads for the stairs, that odd moment broken. Whatever he was looking for, Hannibal didn’t get it right. Will’s voice trails after him: “You first. I think etiquette demands that the one with the most blood in his hair gets first shower. Or it would, if etiquette books covered this sort of thing.”

Hannibal showers slowly, trying not to think too hard about Will’s tongue lapping at the blood on his hand. He changes into clean, dry pajamas and stretches some of the remaining ache from his muscles that wasn’t worked out by the hot water, and then he returns to his bedroom.

Will’s there. Still in his clothes, crutches leaned carefully against the nightstand, stretched out on top of the covers and fast asleep.

Hannibal freezes and observes for a moment, unsure what he’s supposed to do. He could wake Will up and send him back to his room. He could take Will’s bed. He could go sleep on the sofa.

It’s late, and he’s surging with several emotions he doesn’t quite know what to do with, and it’s a big bed. He takes the simplest route and slides as gently as he can under the covers on his own side of the bed, trying not to wake Will. He turns the lamp off quietly and lies awake for a while, listening to Will’s steady breath, watching the sun rise, playing the evening back in his mind.

Eventually, when the sun is high in the sky, he drifts away. When he wakes in the early afternoon, Will is gone. He’d think he dreamed the whole thing, but the pillow smells like Will’s aftershave. He allows himself to bury his face in the pillow and breathe deeply, just once, before he gets on with his day.


	4. Chapter 4

It takes four nights at the bar before Will picks someone up.  He’s forgotten how to do this, like this - in his own clothes and mannerisms and not those he puts on to hunt with Hannibal. How to go looking to satisfy this other, altogether more human, drive.

Also, possibly, he’s a bit hindered by awareness that this is a terrible fucking idea.  Pun not intended, but punning turns out to be just one of the many terrible habits he’s picking up from Hannibal Lecter.

If it weren’t such a terrible fucking idea, he’d just take Deborah back to the house.  But he can’t imagine any scenario where that ends well. He’s probably setting himself up for a brutal fight with Hannibal once he gets home anyway, but at least there won’t be an audience. There won’t be a blast radius.

Not that Hannibal has any right to be angry.  Not that they’ve ever talked directly about the sex life they don’t have.  In those early months Hannibal had made a few light gestures in that direction, polite subtle ones, the type that gave Will an easy out to pretend he didn’t understand what he was being offered.  He’d taken the easy out gratefully. And they’d never talked about it again. 

They’d relaxed into a casual everyday intimacy that in some ways transcends anything Will’s ever had with anyone he was actually fucking.  And Will gets so wound up when they kill together, his body flooded with adrenalin and god knows what else (Hannibal would know, would have an entire lecture on what Will’s body is doing chemically that’s making it confuse murder and desire, but  _ that’s  _ a question Will won’t be asking), and feels so thoroughly and wonderfully exhausted after, that it seems to sate most of his physical needs all on its own.  So it hasn’t been an issue.

But it’s starting to feel untenable.  All that build-up over and over and then...nothing. His own hand in an empty bed or under the shower spray or, one time that he’s trying to forget ever happened, looking at the crime scene photos published a few days later.  The photos had been grainy and sterile but they’d been enough to spark vivid, knee-buckling memories and if he hasn’t ever let himself do that again, it’s only partly shame.  The other part is the awareness that he really, really doesn’t need to encourage himself any further to confuse his human and inhuman drives.  That way lies a killing spree the likes of which Hannibal’s old dinner parties could only dream of aspiring to.

And so, this. This terrible fucking idea.  This hotel room and this entirely nice, entirely normal, entirely willing woman who has absolutely no idea that she’s just locked herself into a room with a killer.  A killer who doesn’t intend to kill her, but that probably wouldn’t comfort her much to know.

Will takes a steadying breath and hopes that if he looks mildly terrified it’s coming off as charmingly shy and not as “I need to prove to myself that I haven’t gone as far off the deep end of normal as I think I have.”   And then he crosses the room to Deborah and cups her face in his hands  _ (gently, gently, touch that isn’t meant to hurt, oh god, what if he gets lost and forgets that, what if he doesn’t know how to touch someone like this anymore) _ and resumes the kisses they’d started in the bar, and in the street outside the bar, and in the elevator on the way to this dingy little room.

It’s nice. Warm and soft and sweet and just...nice.  She tastes like the drink she’d been nursing at the bar, rum and fruit. She tastes nothing like blood or adrenaline.  Deborah has a windchime of a laugh, and she smiles and gives him a playful little push backwards toward the bed and he thinks maybe this is going to work.  He goes, stumbling, a little off-balance, still re-learning the weight and motion of his leg so recently out of its cast.

“You got nervous all of a sudden, huh?” she asks, as she shrugs out of her jacket. “Don’t be. I’m not that scary, and I like you.”

It feels like a betrayal and he’s not sure just what it is he’s betraying. Molly? Hannibal? Deborah herself, who has no idea she’s about to sleep with a fiction? He swallows the thought down into the darkness where so many of his other thoughts live these days and smiles and lies. “I’m not that scary either. Or that nervous. Come over here.”

They tangle together and there are buttons and zippers to contend with and god, it’s been a long time. But apparently this is one of those riding-a-bicycle things. It’s easy and they manage to smooth the awkward bits over with laughter and then the laughter becomes breathy and the breaths become short, heated, panting little things.

And the problem with that is that those breaths feel very much like the ones he takes just after he’s taken a life, when the wicked thrill of it is still crackling under his skin.  And when Will rolls to his back and tugs Deborah over him, it’s mostly because having her beneath him was reminding him a little too much of holding one of their previous victims down and pressing the life out of him with bare hands. Hannibal had liked watching that one particularly and he doesn’t want to be thinking about any of that right now.

He hopes that the “fuck” that slips unbidden from him sounds closer to “yes, please keep doing that thing you’re doing” than to “oh, god, this is not working at all.”

_ Fuck, fuck, fuck _ .

Deborah arches beautifully above him and cries out and he thinks  _ I could separate your life from your body five different ways right now without moving from this bed _ and something in him breaks and he bites his lip so hard when he comes that he finally tastes blood.  Or maybe the blood comes first, and then the release. That’s another thing he doesn’t want to think about too carefully.

There’s some solace in the fact that Deborah, at least, seems to have enjoyed herself.  Someone ought to.  She eases back down to the bed while he disposes of the condom and can’t meet his own eyes in the bathroom mirror.  He comes back to her and they lie together for a while, touching without any real intent, talking a little about nothing in particular, and that’s better.  Calming and not reminiscent of anything that might start or end in blood.

He didn’t intend to stay the night, but he drifts off at some point, and when he wakes there’s early dawn light filtering in and Deborah’s gone. Will’s more relieved about that than he probably should be, but he appreciates her gift of avoiding the awkward morning.  He crumples up and throws away the note she left behind; he won’t be using that phone number.

The drive home is too quiet, few cars on the road in the liminal space where night bleeds into morning.  Not enough distraction from his own thoughts, too scattered to form anything coherent, but buzzing a steady thrum of static in his head just when he needs to be sharp and clear.

The lights are all off and the house locked at this hour.  He lets himself in quietly and heads for the kitchen just as quietly.  He half expects to find Hannibal there waiting up, but he’s not.  It’s not so unusual for either of them to be out late and alone, although the frequency of Will’s excursions has been atypical.  Will forces a glass of water down in an attempt to mitigate the hangover he can feel brewing sickly in the pit of his stomach, and moves quietly up the stairs.

Both the bedroom doors are open.  Which doesn’t mean anything. Hannibal often sleeps with his door open.  But Will knows with a certainty born of both his unique talents and his unnameable bond with Hannibal that he is awake in the darkness of his own room. Awake and coiled tight like an overwound spring or a hunting cat, humming with the kinetic energy of a teacup rushing toward the floor in the breath before it hits and explodes.

He pauses before his own door and considers the additional steps it would take to walk further down the hallway, smelling of alcohol and sex and cheap hotel sheets, past Hannibal’s room to the shower.  Or maybe just into Hannibal’s room.  Considers the steps, and does not take them, but adds the impulse to the whirl of thoughts creating background noise in his brain.

He turns to his own room, shucks off his clothes in a messy heap, and climbs wearily into his own bed, sprawling on his stomach and enjoying the feel of the cool, soft linens against his skin instead of scratchy hotel sheets.  

He’s almost drifted away when his spine tingles with the knowledge that he’s being watched.  He didn’t hear the footsteps - you never do, when Hannibal doesn’t want you to - but he knows just the same and forces his breathing slow and steady. Waiting. Neither fish nor bait in this moment. Just Will.  Just Hannibal.  Just the instant when a swift hand might still slip between the teacup and the floor, intervene and prevent the shattering.

Ten breaths, fifteen, and then he does hear footsteps as Hannibal returns to his room and closes his door. It takes that, the click of the door, to clear the buzz in Will’s head.  His own motivations fall into place as they so often do for him, only after the fact, only when it’s too late to matter.  

It’s never so much that he was wrong about his intentions - he really had meant to try to untangle the snarled knot of his human and inhuman desires with tangible proof that they can exist separately.  But there’s often a second layer he doesn’t see until later.  And it only now occurs to him that he’d also been intentionally shoving at the careful balance of his life with Hannibal, its harmonies and tensions.  Trying to reopen a closed question.  

_Wind Hannibal up and watch how he goes._  

Surely if he’d intended anything else, he would have taken a shower at the hotel. Come home early enough for plausible deniability.  Something. But he didn’t.  

Sleep comes for Will eventually but it takes a long time, and it doesn’t treat him gently when it arrives at last.


	5. Chapter 5

Hannibal hasn’t stabbed anyone, broken anything, or otherwise done anything that would require advanced theoretical physics to walk back, so in the circumstances he thinks he’s doing pretty well. 

He’s barely slept but that’s nothing new; he has to go a few nights before those effects really start to sink in. Years of medical training, two subsequent fields of work that require semi-regular late-night emergency calls, and his extracurricular hobbies, have seen to that.

He can handle a lot of things. 

He cannot handle sitting across from Will Graham at breakfast while he smells of sex and perfume and cheap hotel fabric softener. 

There are limits to his self-control. At least, there are limits if breakfast isn’t to end regrettably, and they’ve been doing so well at spilling only  _ other _ people’s blood, these past months.

Hannibal dresses in the semi-dark and leaves the house long before Will wakes up. He does not breathe in as he walks past Will’s door. He does not turn his head to watch Will sleep. He does not allow himself to scoop up his packed go-bag from the hall closet, where they each keep one for emergency getaways. If he had it with him he might never come back at all, and he has a clear enough head to know he’d regret that. Eventually. Possibly not anytime soon.

He just gets in the car and he drives without a destination, the movement itself his goal. He gets on the highway and it’s near empty at this time of the night/morning. It’s tempting to floor the car to its limits, see how fast he can outrace what he doesn’t want to think about. But he will not get pulled over, risk being recognized and taken in, because Will stinks of someone else. So he drives just at the speed limit, mile after mile of blacktop rolling away beneath him, until the sun is up and he’s far from home.

He stops for breakfast in a nondescript diner. Adequate omelette, burnt toast, hot acrid coffee that burns his tongue. He’s had worse. They’ve had worse, together, in the early days on the run when selectivity was not an option available to them. 

The day passes that way - driving, stopping, mindless breaks taken in nondescript establishments. Wind and speed and a coiling, writhing anger burning just under his skin. Anger at Will. Anger at whatever unworthy person was allowed to  _ touch  _ Will and walk away with all their limbs and organs intact. He itches with it, crawls with it - he’d scratch his skin off to get the feeling out if it would go. 

Sometimes it’s surprising and delightful, the feelings Will Graham pulls to Hannibal’s surface from the fathomless, calm pool where his emotions usually slumber. Amusing to remember that he can feel things at all. Other times, when it’s like this, he’d hold the emotions down under the pool’s surface and choke the life from them if he could, to ensure they would never rise again. Better not to have feelings at all than to be snared by them like this. 

He halfheartedly assesses a dozen or so people for slaughter over the course of the day. He’s got a knife in his pocket. He’s got his hands. He’s got enough churning rage to burn down a city block. It would be easy enough, if only it would do any good.

The waitress at the first diner would go down quickly, he’d trip her when she passed the booth and be on her before she even realized it had happened. A quick and clean neck snap, he could probably be halfway to the door before anyone even understood what had happened.

The truck driver who cuts him off without signaling, he could follow to a rest stop. Slash the tires, maybe, and then the man himself. He’d make that one slow. He’d make it hurt. He’d make it last.

There’s a child screaming at a cafe where he stops for a cup of coffee and Hannibal doesn’t hurt children, but he could forget that on a day like this.

He plays almost idly with the knife he habitually carries in his pocket, checking the sharpness, checking how smoothly it unfolds and folds again when he can do so unobserved. A single well-oiled  _ click _ , and another to close. He cleans it well afterwards, whenever he has cause to use it in their games. 

_ Click-click. Click-click.  _

_ Click-click. _

_ Click. _

_ Click. _

Plenty of opportunities but none of them would have the audience he wanted. Blood shed without Will hardly seems worth the effort.

He does not pick up his phone when it rings late in the morning. He glances only briefly at the single text message Will sends in the afternoon, asking if Hannibal is coming home for dinner. 

He doesn’t respond. He does, a few miles later, turn the car around and start retracing his path home.

It’s well into the evening by the time he drives by the house. The lights aren’t on. Will’s car isn’t there. He wonders sharp like a blade between his ribs whether Will would have been home, if Hannibal had answered the phone.

They know the local bars pretty well from their hunting expeditions.  It doesn’t take Hannibal long to make the rounds, but he doesn’t find Will’s car anywhere. He could go home. The sensible thing would be to go home. Hannibal passed sensible a while ago. 

Instead, he pulls out his phone again. No further messages from Will. He pulls up an app he hasn’t had cause to use yet, one he’s not even sure Will knows is activated on their phones. It’s possible Will knows and has turned it off, but - nope. There it is. A little blinking dot, for finding your lost phone or your lost child. Or your lost murder partner. Tools have applications beyond those for which they were created.

He makes a note of the intersection on the map near the dot and drives off into the night.

It’s a small hotel, run-down but not too far on the seedy side of things. Hannibal doesn’t need the blinking light to tell him he’s in the right place; he sees the car. He glances into it as he walks by on his way to the front desk, but there’s nothing that seems interesting enough to bother investigating at the moment.

It’s not Hannibal’s first go-round with sweet-talking his way around a front desk clerk. This one doesn’t even take much work. She gives up the room number with barely any effort at all. 

It’s also not his first go-round with jimmying a hotel lock. He could do it easily. He might, if he had a plan that depended on surprise. But he doesn’t really have a plan at all. This isn’t about a plan. This is about the roaring in his ears, the crawling under his skin, and the knowledge that even if no promises were made, Will Graham  _ belongs _ to him, belongs  _ with _ him, and there’s no plan involved beyond a need to make that very clear since apparently Will missed the memo on that at some point.

So he skips the jimmying and just knocks on the door, curious to see what will happen when he does.

What happens is there’s an indistinct voice and the sound of a lock and the door opens a crack to reveal an inch or two of mussed ash-blonde hair, a bare forearm, and a confused, “Yes?”

In the space between one pained heartbeat and the next, Hannibal takes in several pieces of information. He can hear a shower running. He can tell that if he kicks this door open it’s going to swing back and hurt the man behind it. The person behind it  _ is _ a man, and a shirtless one at that. And he smells like Will and like cheap beer. 

In the space after the next heartbeat, Hannibal breathes in, focuses, and kicks the door, hard, following its momentum into the room. He has plenty of time to turn and lock it behind him while the stranger is sprawled on the floor, grasping at his arm where the door hit it, staring wide-eyed at Hannibal and opening his mouth to scream or curse.

The shower is still running. There’s no sign of Will except for his smell in the air. Everything moves very, very slowly. Hannibal tastes blood and isn’t sure if it’s real or imagined. He doesn’t reach for the knife. He doesn’t have to. This he’ll do with his hands, for the fun of it, because the man’s hands touched what is his. 

He’s on his knees before the scream even begins, cutting it off to a groan with one hand, pressing the other to the man’s throat, pressing him down to the floor with his weight. He wonders abstractly, distantly, if Will pressed him down like this or if it was the reverse. He could let up on the pressure and ask.

He doesn’t. He slides his other hand down to join the first on the man’s throat and he presses, hard, exulting in the flutter under his fingers, the hitch in it, the choke, the scrabbling of the man’s bare feet on threadbare carpet, gaining no purchase.

He presses, and he holds, and the man’s eyes roll back and they’re so close, almost there together, almost to the moment when the outcome is inevitable, and then the water shuts off and there’s the sound of a sliding shower door.

It shouldn’t be a distraction, Hannibal’s killed people in much more distracting circumstances, but the shower door means  _ Will _ and Hannibal lets up for just a moment and it’s enough for the man beneath him to twist and kick and gain a bit of leverage that lets him stand, sputtering and choking and too hoarse to scream now.

If he were smart he’d try for the door, but he’s oxygen deprived and terrified and anyway there’s a monster in a person suit standing between him and the exit so he just tries for  _ away _ , whirling and heading toward the other side of the room where the bed is.

Hannibal slides the knife out of his pocket as he follows.

_ Click _ .

The man Will brought to this dingy hotel room where he’s going to die makes it about four steps, and then Hannibal brings him down onto the bed. The blanket and sheets are still rumpled and thrown back, and for whatever happened in that bed, the price is fair, Hannibal thinks, as he brings the knife down.

There’s a gurgle and a moan and a gush.

There’s a  _ click _ as Hannibal closes the knife again.

There’s his own breath, only a little sped-up but sped-up nonetheless.

The blood pool on the bed spreads, slowly. Sinks into the mattress. Drips onto the carpet.

And there’s the sound of the bathroom door opening, and Hannibal turns around to a damp Will, flushed from the shower, his shirt clinging to his still-damp skin, staring at Hannibal with a completely unreadable expression.

“What. The.  _ Fuck.  _ Hannibal?” 


	6. Chapter 6

Will lets the shower run for a long time, standing there with the water pounding down, just letting the noise and heat blank out his brain.  He doesn’t want to think. And part of him hopes maybe when he goes back out into the room, Jeremy will be gone.

He hadn’t intended any of this.  He’d gone out for a drink, just that, when the quiet of the empty house had been too much to take.  One drink had turned into five, the last two purchased by Jeremy, and at some point he’d found himself thinking  _ fuck it.  Maybe this is what I need. Maybe this is why last night didn’t work.  _

And one thing had led to another and now here he is trying to sober up in the world’s longest, hottest shower, but eventually he has to concede he’s not getting any more sober and the conversation awaiting him in the bedroom isn’t getting any less awkward.  So he slides the shower door open and reaches for a towel and starts to dry off.

An odd noise catches his attention and he frowns, then reaches for his t-shirt and boxers even though he’s not quite dry yet. He tugs them on - not sure why he’s suddenly feeling shy about nudity in front of someone whose mouth was just on his dick, stranger or not, but it is what it is - and exits the bathroom.

Whatever he was going to ask dies in his throat. Dies like Jeremy, who is -  _ fuck fuck what the fuck _ , Will thinks incoherently - bleeding out on the bed, dripping scarlet onto the carpet, and his face may be turned toward Will but whatever he’s looking at is nowhere in the room. Ding-dong, Jeremy’s dead.

And Hannibal fucking Lecter is standing over him, bloody knife in hand, all monster and not a hint of man, all fangs and blood and snarl. The entire scene short-circuits something in Will’s brain until all he can gasp out is “What the  _ fuck _ , Hannibal?”

He wants to be the person whose impulse is to run over to the bed and try to save Jeremy.  He might have been that person, once. He was for Abigail, the time he saved her, before the time he didn’t.  But he’s who he is, and who he is these days is the person who can quickly assess that there’s no saving there, and whose next words instead are: “How the hell are we supposed to hide this? What the fuck were you thinking?” 

It takes Hannibal a minute to come back far enough for words, he’s that far gone into the monster, and while he’s fighting his way back to the remains of his humanity Will just watches him, wary and furious and trying hard not to react the way he always does to the sight of Hannibal speckled with blood.  Because it’s one thing when it’s someone they’ve chosen and killed together, but it should be -- has to be -- something different when it’s someone Will was kissing an hour ago.  Surely it’s something different.

Will tries to tell that to the heat under his skin that’s not all about the scalding shower he just took.  He tries to tell it to the part of him that wants to lick Jeremy’s blood off Hannibal’s sharp cheekbones.  He lies to himself as hard as he possibly can that he isn’t as turned-on as he is horrified, because it’s the only way he’s going to stay sane for the next half hour, and he’s the closest thing to sanity in this room right now.

Just when he’s about to scream from the silence, Hannibal finds his voice again, or some roughened version of it.  Enough to ask, “Was there some other outcome you were expecting, Will?”

“I wasn’t… this wasn’t a  _ plan _ .  Not everything I do is about you.”  Christ, Will’s tired suddenly.  “You weren’t home. I went out for a drink. This just happened. Things  _ happen _ . You don’t  _ own _ me, Hannibal.”

Hannibal doesn’t dignify that with a response beyond a look that says  _ we own each other _ and he’s not wrong.  Will knows he’s not wrong. But he’s not going to get dragged into feeling responsible for the dead man dripping blood onto the carpet, either.  He didn’t hold the fucking knife.

Will holds his hand out, palm up, and says, “Give me the knife.”  Hannibal clutches it for just a moment, a moment long enough for Will to remember the kitchen and the linoleum knife and how tightly Hannibal had held him while tearing him open.  But then he hands over the knife.  Because Hannibal almost always does what Will wants him to, when blood is involved.

The knife in his hand is heavy and wet and sticky with blood. Will thinks  _ yes, get your fingerprints all over the murder weapon, Graham, you fucking moron _ , and then he slips the knife into his pocket and releases a fraction of the tension in his frame.  He’s at least pretty sure he’s not going to get stabbed, now. In this situation that counts as an improvement.

Hannibal’s eyes slip shut and for a moment he looks tired, too, and Will fights a terrible tender impulse to reach out and smooth his mussed, sticky hair back from his face.  Hannibal says in a low, wounded voice, “This wasn’t a plan, either. A predictable outcome of events set in motion, but not a plan.”

“ _ Fuck _ .”  It’s not eloquent, but what else is there to say, really?  The anger drains from Will in a rush, leaving him empty, shaky with adrenaline and with the remnants of beer and sex still somewhere in the back of his mind.  He gropes for the desk chair and sits down hard.  It would be wise to stop getting fingerprints everywhere, but what’s the point, now?  “It’s…fuck.  This room.  My fingerprints are everywhere.  My hair’s in the shower drain.”  He leaves unspoken that there’ll be DNA all over Jeremy’s body when they find it, mostly his, probably some of Hannibal’s too if Jeremy got any scratches in.  It seems tasteless to point it out, in this situation.  “And it’s registered to me.  They’ll trace it back to the house. They’ll find us.  Do you have some bright idea for dealing with this that I’m overlooking?”

He can’t think about Jeremy as a person right now, a person who was warm and kind and willing an hour ago, because that way lies the howling abyss.  Jeremy’s a problem to be solved now.  Work the problem.  Feelings later, maybe, if they get out of this without killing each other or finding their way into FBI custody.

Hannibal’s been doing this longer than he has, but Will knows they’re both seeing the same thing.  A body they’re not getting out of the hotel and down two flights of stairs and out to the parking lot without being seen.  Nor does it seem particularly likely that they can smuggle up materials to break the body down, then take it out in bags, without making an even bigger mess that would be impossible to clean up adequately.  And should that all somehow be possible, there’s the rest to deal with.  They could flip the mattress. They could steal fresh sheets from another room.  Wipe down the walls, maybe.  But the blood’s deep into the carpet, soaked into the padding underneath, and there’s just...no.  There’s no way they’re getting out of this room clean.

“I’m sorry.”  The words rip out of Hannibal like they hurt, and they probably do.  “We’ll have to run.”

Will nods and stares bleakly around the room and can’t come up with anything better than “Me, too.  None of this was supposed to happen.  Fuck.  Can you…?”  He gestures vaguely toward the bed and knows Hannibal will understand what he wants. He does, drawing the sheet up over Jeremy’s face so he’ll stop looking at Will with the blank accusatory stare of the innocent dead.  Will could do without ever seeing that stare on anyone, ever again.

Hannibal passes a hand over his eyes, smearing a streak of blood onto the back of his hand, and checks his watch.  It’s still early, not midnight yet.  They’ll have some time, before anyone finds this in the morning.  Will can see Hannibal’s fingers shaking, just a little bit.  “Shall we stick with the plan?”

Will knows that really means  _ are you leaving me? _

They have a plan for this.  It’s well-rehearsed.  They’d nearly lost each other the time before, when they’d departed New Orleans a scant few breaths ahead of the FBI, without a plan.  Determined not to let that happen again, now they plan.  Packed bags, a predetermined destination.  Separate routes to get there, winding indirect routes, routes that will keep them apart and out of contact for three weeks but also increase the chances that at least one of them will make it to their rendezvous point even if the other gets caught. They’ve talked it over dozens of times.  They could do it in their sleep.  

Except when they last reviewed this plan they’d assumed they’d be doing it as partners, friends, whatever word you might use for the conjoined thing that they are.  Not like this.  Not fresh off anger and betrayal and hurt.

Hannibal’s asking,  _ will you be there when I get there, or will you vanish somewhere between here and there?  Does it end in this room?  Did we finally break this too badly to repair? _

Will doesn’t know what he wants, but he knows he doesn’t want any of the stupid things he’s been trying in the last few days.  And he knows he wants them both free, so they can figure out the rest together, if they can just stop being stupid long enough to do that.

He swallows hard and tries to force sureness he doesn’t feel into his voice and says, “Yes. We stick to the plan.  You go first.  Take a half hour head start and get going.  I’ll do what I can here and then leave.  Be gone before I get home to pick up my bag, okay?  We can’t do any more of...this, tonight.  There’s no time.”  He waves vaguely around the room at the word “this.”  

Hannibal looks rooted to the floor, and doesn’t show the slightest indication that he might move or go anywhere.  He looks wrecked, that way he does when he doesn’t have the slightest idea how to handle an overload of human feeling.  Will feels it again, that tug toward tenderness, mingling awkwardly with the desire to strangle Hannibal and the desire to suck the blood from Hannibal’s fingers and the desire to just sit down and cry and have Hannibal tell him everything’s going to be okay.

Will has no idea whether everything is going to be okay, ever again.

He’s tired of fighting Hannibal. He’s tired of fighting himself. He’s exhausted and wired and he’s going to have to somehow stay awake long enough to at least drive across state lines before he finds somewhere to go to ground for a few hours and sleep, and he’s feeling pretty wrecked and without options himself, and he’s not sure he’s ever going to see Hannibal again after they walk out of this room, if their escape plans go badly.

He does the only thing he can think of that’s left to him, with all the other options tried or burned down or closed off.

He closes the distance and he lets his hands play in Hannibal’s blood-spattered hair the way they want to and he presses his mouth against Hannibal’s.  It’s not quite a kiss, it’s not quite a bite, it’s something feral that there’s not really a name for.  But whatever it is, it breaks Hannibal’s stillness and it breaks something loose in Will, something that wasn’t there when he kissed Deborah, or Jeremy, or maybe anyone he’s ever kissed in his life. He stops thinking about getaways or innocent victims or anything at all except lips and tongues and Hannibal’s fingers suddenly wound tight in his hair and pulling sounds from him like he’s just another one of Hannibal’s musical instruments. He tastes blood and has no idea whose it is.

When he breaks away, almost shoving Hannibal back from him with both hands, it’s not so much because he  _ wants _ to as because this is about to spiral very badly out of control otherwise and there really isn’t time.  Nor, clearly, are either he or Hannibal to be trusted with acting on impulse at the moment, judging by the catastrophe they’re standing in the middle of.

“ _ Will--” _

“ _ Go,  _ Hannibal.  _ Fuck _ .”  He’s panting like he’s just run a marathon and Hannibal doesn’t look much steadier.  He shoves at him again, not entirely gently, toward the door.  “Get moving.  Get out of here.  Stay safe.  Be there in three weeks.  If you still want to stab things I’ll give you the knife back if you come and get it from me.”

“I am currently feeling no desire whatsoever to stab anyone.” Hannibal’s as close to giddy as Will’s ever seen him, somehow wrecked and giddy all at once, and it’s monstrous and charming all at the same time.  That shouldn’t be possible but somehow it is.  “Three weeks. If you’re not there I will hunt you down wherever you go.”

“I’ll be there.”  Will can barely hear his own voice; all the breath has gone out of him.  He feels like he’s been punched in the stomach.  “ _ Go _ .”

They look at each other for one moment longer, confused and breathless and bloody and angry and delighted, as if it has to last them longer than three weeks.  As if this might be the last look either of them gets.

And then Hannibal’s out the door and gone, back to the house, to get his bag and to start his escape.

Will sits down again, mostly because his legs are about to give out if he doesn’t, and stares blankly around the room trying to process the last twenty minutes.  He needs to get up.  He needs to get his things, and to figure out if there’s anything at all he can do to make this room any less of a neon sign saying “Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham Were Here, Committing What Probably Looks Like A Sex Crime, Please Don’t Tell Freddie Lounds”.  He needs to give Hannibal his head start, and then get out of here and start his own escape route.

He’ll just sit here and catch his breath for one more minute first.

_ What the fuck, Graham? _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come back soon for the third and final installment of this particularly screwed up version of Hannigram, in which we will explore the question, is there any way these two idiot murder puppies can make things even worse before they make things better? 
> 
> My money's on "they'll probably find some way to manage it."
> 
> (In other news, I am reading and delighting in your comments, I'm just still clawing my way back to health from Death Plague 2016 and haven't quite summoned the energy to actually go through and reply to everything yet. I will eventually. Meanwhile please just know I appreciate and love them all.)

**Author's Note:**

> Remember when this was a one-shot? Sigh.
> 
> If you want to continue to be a terrible influence on me and make me draw all of my one-shots out endlessly, you know what to do. I love your kudos and comments, and I flail around too much [on Tumblr](http://damnslippyplanet.tumblr.com) if you want to come join me.


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